Vucetic, Greatness & Decline: National Identity & Foreign Policy in Postwar Britain

Online Appendix A Table 1 Finding Britishness, 1950-2000: Textual Sources Year Speeches Newspapers Textbooks Films Novels

1950 Attlee. The King’s Speech, Daily Express Carter & Mears. History of Britain. The Blue Lamp Christie. A Murder Is Announced (Lab) 1.3. Attlee. Margate, Daily Mirror Rayner. Short History of Britain What the Butler Shute. A Town Like Alice 3.10. Saw 1960 Macmillan. Scarborough, Daily Express Barker & Ollard. General History of Doctor in Love Fleming. Dr No (Bond series) (Cons) 15.10. England Macmillan. The Queen’s Daily Mirror Strong. History of Britain & the World Sink the Christie. 4.50 from Paddington Speech, 1. 11. Bismarck! 1970 Wilson. HC Deb on Daily Express Titley. Machines, Money & Men On Her Majesty's Christie. Endless Night (both) Address 2.6 Secret Service Heath. HC Deb on Add. Daily Mirror Larkin. English History Battle for Britain MacLean. Force 10 from Navarone 2.6. 1980 Thatcher. Brighton. Daily Express Hill. British Eco and Soc History. Life of Brian Forsyth. The Devil’s Alternate (Cons) 10.10. The Queen’s Speech. Daily Mirror Sked & Cook. Post-War Britain McVicar Smith. Wild Justice 7. 11. 1990 The Queen’s Speech. The Sun Kavanagh & Morris. Consensus Politics Shirley Valentine Forsyth. The Negotiator (Cons) 7. 11. Major. 'First Speech', Daily Mirror Connolly & Barry. Britain 1900-1939 & The Krays Smith. A Time to Die 4. 12. May. Economic and Social History 2000 Blair. Brighton. The Sun Walsh. Modern World History. Chicken Run Rowling. Harry Potter and the Goblet (Lab) 26. 9. of Fire Blair. ‘Britain speech’ Daily Mail Culpin & Turner. Making Modern Billy Elliott Rowling. Harry Potter and the 28. 3. Britain Philosopher’s Stone NOTES: The reports for 1980, 1990, and 2000 are co-authorships with, respectively, David Orr, Kristen M. Olver and Alyssa Maraj Graham, while Melanie Mitchell and Kalathmika Natarajan provided invaluable research assistance in identifying and collecting historical materials. Coding was done from June 2015 to December 2017. For more on source selections, including complete bibliography, see Appendix. For complete reports, coding examples, and hyperlinks to select newspaper samples, see the project website https://www.makingidentitycount.org/

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Vucetic, Greatness & Decline: National Identity & Foreign Policy in Postwar Britain

Appendix A: Finding Britishness

Leadership speeches. My collaborators and I aimed to select two documents that were at once high circulating, regular (regularly scheduled national speech) and on “anything but national identity” (nothing on devolution or “The Future of Britishness,” for example). The prime minister’s statements in the “State Opening of Parliament,” a new session of Parliament and the “annual party conference speech” met these criteria. With respect to the first, UK government’s legislative program (a.k.a. the ministerial agenda) for the forthcoming parliamentary session is traditionally laid out in the Queen’s Speech (in 1950: the King’s Speech), aka the “Most Gracious Speech from the Throne.” Set in 1852, the ceremony involves the monarch reading out a speech prepared by the prime minister’s office in the Lords Chamber. In the period under study, the combination of the royal pomp and disclosure of the upcoming policies and pieces of legislation by the government naturally attracted significant media attention, including a live television audience.

Party conferences normally take place in early fall and away from the capital city— Birmingham or Brighton, for example. They have also evolved over time, with latter years witnessing the emergence of workshops, book fairs, movie screenings and other events within. In the immediate postwar decades, the party conference was a site of policy-making; from about 1980 onwards, it became an opportunity for image-making. The prime minister’s speech was always the central event, however.

We departed from this rule thrice. In 1970 the UK had a change of government and we decided to have one leadership speech from each the two prime ministers that year: the outgoing Wilson (Labour) and the incoming Heath (Conservative). We selected the speeches the two leaders gave in the post-election State Opening on 2 July. Both speeches were given during the “Debate on the Address”, a.k.a. “Loyal Address”, which is when members of both houses debate the content of the speech (an “Address in Reply to Her Majesty’s Gracious Speech”)— another long-standing parliamentary ritual.

In the year 1990 the UK again had two prime ministers: Margaret Thatcher resigned on 22 November. The subsequent leadership contest within the Conservative Party was carried by John Major, Chancellor of the Exchequer, who then became the nation’s leader on 28 November 1990. His speech at the Queen Elizabeth II Conference Centre on 4 December 1990 was his first as the prime minister.

In 2000, we selected Tony Blair’s “Britain speech” on March 28, rather than the Queen’s Speech or his statement in the Debate on the Address on December 6. This was done to reflect the evolution of the media coverage of prime minister speeches, and the fact that the former actually gained more headlines than the latter.

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Vucetic, Greatness & Decline: National Identity & Foreign Policy in Postwar Britain

Newspapers. We followed the rankings based on the Press Council and Audit Bureau of Circulations circulation figures or the closest equivalent.1 Accordingly we selected Daily Express and Daily Mirror from 1950 through 1980, The Sun and Daily Mirror for 1990 and The Sun and Daily Mail in 2000. Although in national circulation numbers The Sun overtook Daily Express already in 1980, we still used the latter due to some difficulties in accessing the former’s archive. With this selection, we achieved some variance in ownership structures and ideological orientations of newspapers known as “popular” or “mass-market” (a.k.a. “red-tops”, a.k.a. “tabloids”). We sampled the editions published on the 15th day of each month, including, when appropriate, Sunday equivalents of the selected newspaper (Sunday Mirror, Sunday Express, Mail on Sunday but not News of the World).

History textbooks. For each year under study we selected two high school-level publications on modern English or British history that were most likely to have been used at the time in private and state schools in the UK, primarily in England. To that end, we reviewed the histories and institutional contexts of the educational program in history in England, and then combed contemporary and historical reviews and discussions in journals Teaching History and History of Education Review. While it is true that UK history teachers began to use textbooks in their classrooms only following the introduction of history General Certificate of Education Exam (GCSE) and the National Curriculum initiative in the late 1980s, it is still the case that numerous textbooks—and ‘topic-books’—existed and circulated throughout the period under study. Whenever appropriate, we used publications catering to students between the ages of 14 and 19, particularly those studying for history GCSE and history A Level exams (more advanced qualifications generally required for university entrance) or their closest historical equivalents (CSE/O-Level). Next, we looked for ample reflection on “the last hundred years,” whatever the type of history (economic, social, cultural, political etc.) as well as for “recent editions”—that is, editions published in the beginning of the year or in the preceding year or two—1958 or 1959 for 1960, for example. If one of the two textbooks we selected covered only a short period of history and/or was exceptionally short, we added a third textbook to our sample.

Novels. Identifying “bestselling novels” was challenging. To select two top-selling items on the consumer market of books bought by private individuals for their own use or as gifts in each year, we first consulted scholarly histories of the book and of UK fiction industry. For 1950 and 1960, we consulted annual round-ups of the bestseller market by W.H. Smith’s Trade News, The Observer, The Bookseller, Evening Standard, Evening News, Time & Tide, The Sunday Telegraph, and The Daily Express and picked the two British-authored novels closest to the top of each list. For 1970 and 1980, the reliability of bestseller lists improved thanks to introduction of surveys,

1 For further details, see Srdjan Vucetic, “The United Kingdom, 1950-2000—Primary Texts,” 23 June 2016. Available at https://srdjanvucetic.wordpress.com/research/id/srdj-postwar-uk-sources-final/

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Vucetic, Greatness & Decline: National Identity & Foreign Policy in Postwar Britain

automated data collection (after 1980) and other ranking instruments. Especially helpful were secondary assessments of said lists published in specialist magazines such as The Listener, a weekly BBC magazine published until 1991, and by journalist Alex Hamilton in The Guardian (from 1970 onwards). For 1990 and 2000, we followed the rankings generated by computerized data capture via Electronic Point-of-Sale equipment and disseminated by companies such as Nielsen BookScan. As Table 1 shows, several authors appear in multiple years: Fleming, Christie, Smith, Forsyth, and Rowling.

The paperback revolution changed our selection criteria as well since it rendered paperback the dominant format for bestsellers. First, the paperback revolution changed the meaning of high- circulating: in the late 1940s, a top hardback novel would achieve sales of 100,000 over several years, whereas in the 1990s a bestselling paperback would have 500,000 copies sold in weeks. Second, this means that some our “bestselling novels of the year” after 1960 were in fact paperback editions of a hardback released a year, two or three before the year of the study. In 1960, we thus selected Ian Fleming’s Dr No, released in March 1958 over Fleming’s For Your Eyes Only, released in April 1960. In principle, either one would have been acceptable as UK readers en masse were enjoying multiple Fleming’s Bond novels. However, Dr. No, the sixth book in the espionage adventure series, topped that year’s bestseller with more than 150,000 copies old thanks to the paperback release in February as well as, to a lesser extent, due to both text and comic-strip serializations that year in Daily Express. For Your Eyes Only, in contrast, was released in hardback and sold less than 22,000 copies.2 The same rationale applied to 4.50 from Paddington, a novel by Agatha Christie first published in November 1957 but appearing in paperback three years later with Fontana Books.3

Movies. To select top watched movies by UK directors we followed two strategies. For the 1950-1980 period, we referred to the end-of-the-year movie reports published in The Times. Based on the annual surveys of box-office returns (including both “general release” and “reserved tickets”) collected and analyzed by the industry publication Motion Picture Herald, these reports do not provide details such as the numbers of viewers, but they helpfully identify and sometimes rank-order most watched movies in the UK. For 1990 and 2000, we used the

2 Bennett and Woollacott (1987: 26); Benson (2015: 17). 3 Neither is to be confused with “the steady longterm sellers” such as the Bible, Tolkien’s three-volume fantasy The Lord of the Rings (1954-5) and, arguably, George Orwell’s Animal Farm (1945). In all cases we selected novels dealing with contemporary themes. To go with the year 1960 again, we were initially drawn to Lady Chatterley’s Lover by D.H. Lawrence, a book that sold over 200,000 paperback copies within weeks following the infamous obscenity trial in November-October of that year. However, this was a Penguin paperback of a book published in 1928. Our runner ups included John Braine’s Room at the Top (1957), which sold well thanks to a lucrative paperback-movie tie-in in 1959 and David Storey’s This Sporting Life, which won the 1960 Macmillan Fiction Award, and On the Beach by Nevil Shute, a novel first published in 1957 that sold well in tens of thousands due to the author’s death in 1960 and the story’s cinamatization in 1959, but without quite reaching the numbers of Fleming and Christie books.

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Vucetic, Greatness & Decline: National Identity & Foreign Policy in Postwar Britain

box office data reported in the histories of the British film, the British Film Institute’s BFI Film and Television Handbook above all. In the case of a tie, we went for the more British of the two. For 1980, for example, we selected McVicar over Yanks because the former was a UK production and the latter a UK-US one.

Film histories were also helpful to determine the right selection in terms of release dates. Whenever we had a rankings tie, we selected the more recent release. For example: McVicar, released in August 1980, over Yanks, released in September 1979. For the earlier years, however, we acknowledged that movies released in the previous year often topped most watched estimates in the following year (showings of popular movies sometimes went on for 18 consecutive months, for example).

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Vucetic, Greatness & Decline: National Identity & Foreign Policy in Postwar Britain

Bibliography

Speeches

British Political Speech, online archive, http://www.britishpoliticalspeech.org/

The Official Report (Hansard). https://hansard.parliament.uk/

Newspapers

Daily Mirror

Daily Express

Daily Mail

The Sun

Textbooks

Barker, William Alan, G. R. St Aubyn, and Richard Lawrence Ollard. A General History of England 1832–1960. 2nd ed. London: A & C Black, 1960.

Carter, E.H., and R. A. F. Mears. A history of Britain 1876-1953. 2nd ed. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1948.

Collier, Chris. AQA AS history Britain 1906-1951: unit 1. Ed. Sally Waller. Cheltenham: Nelson Thornes, 2008.

Connolly, P., and Barry Phillips. Britain, 1900-1939. Southwick: Spartacus Educational Publishers, 1989.

Culpin, C., and Brian Turner. Making Modern Britain: British social and economic history from the 18th century to the present day. London: Collins Educational, 1987.

Hill, C.P. British Economic and Social History 1700-1975. 4th ed. 1977.

Kavanagh, Dennis, and Peter Morris. Consensus politics from Attlee to Thatcher. 1st ed. Oxford : Basil Blackwell, 1989.

Larkin, Patrick John. English History for Certificate Classes 1789-1939. London: Hulton Educational Publications, 1964.

Lynch, Michael. Access to History: Britain 1945-2007, 1st ed. London: Hodder Education, 2008.

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Vucetic, Greatness & Decline: National Identity & Foreign Policy in Postwar Britain

May, Trevor. An Economic & Social History of Britain: 1760-1970. 1st ed. Harlow: Longman, 1987.

Rayner, R. A short history of Britain. Longman, 1948.

Sked, Alex and Chris Cook. Post-War Britain: A Political History, 1st ed. Sussex: The Harvester Press, 1979.

Strong, C., and Charles Frederick. History of Britain and the World, Book Five: The Twentieth Century and the Contemporary World. 2nd ed. [S.I.]: U.L.P., 1956.

Titley, D.P. Machines, money & men. Hart-Davis, 1979.

Walsh, Ben. GCSE Modern World History. 1st ed. John Murray, 1996.

Novels

Christie, Agatha. A Murder Is Announced. New York: Harper, 2007 (originally: London: Collins Crime Club, 1950).

Christie, Agatha. Endless Night. London: Collins Crime Club, 1967, paperback.

Christie, Agatha. 4.50 from Paddington. London: Fontana, 1960, paperback.

Fleming, Ian. Dr No. London: Pan Books, 1960, paperback.

Forsyth, Frederick. The Devil’s Alternate London: Hutchinson, 1979.

Forsyth, Frederick. The Negotiator. London: Bantam Press, 1989.

MacLean, Alistar. Force 10 from Navarone. London: Collins Crime Club, 1968, paperback.

Rowling, J. K. Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2000.

Rowling, J. K. Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 1997.

Shute, Nevil. A Town Like Alice. London: Heinemann, 1971. (originally: London: Heinemann, 1950).

Smith, Wilbur. Wild Justice. London: Heinemann, 1979.

Smith, Wilbur. A Time to Die. London: Heinemann, 1989.

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Vucetic, Greatness & Decline: National Identity & Foreign Policy in Postwar Britain

Movies

Battle for Britain (dir. Guy Hamilton), 1970.

Billy Elliott (dir. Stephen Daldry), 2000.

Chicken Run (dir. Peter Lord and Nick Park), 2000.

Doctor in Love (dir. Ralph Thomas), 1960.

Life of Brian (dir. Terry Jones), 1980.

McVicar (dir. Tom Clegg), 1980.

On Her Majesty's Secret Service (dir. Peter R. Hunt), 1970.

Sink the Bismarck! (dir. Lewis Gilbert), 1960.

Shirley Valentine (dir. Lewis Gilbert), 1990.

The Blue Lamp (dir. Basil Dearden), 1950.

The Krays (dir. Peter Medak), 1990.

Wooden Horse (dir. Jack Lee), 1950.

Secondary Sources cited in Appendix A

Bennett, Tony, and Janet Woollacott. Bond and beyond: The political career of a popular hero. MacMillan Education, Limited, 1987.

Benson, Raymond. The James Bond Bedside Companion. Crossroad Press, 2015.

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